Left In Lowell

MissLaura at dkos flawlessly tears down another mainstream media perpetrated wall about woman, and blogging. If the storyline don’t fit, just ignore it and use other examples…

Reporters start with an easy premise: The bloggers their readers are most likely to have heard of are men. Markos Moulitsas. Duncan “Atrios” Black. Josh Marshall. The problem is, all too often, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Recently, Megan Carpentier of Glamour magazine’s blog Glamocracy asked Markos why there aren’t as many female political bloggers. He answered:

I disagree with that notion. The Daily Kos executive editor, a blogger, of course, is female. Digby is female. Jane Hamsher is female. There are other prominent women (including seven on Daily Kos) writing in group blogs. [links added]

That answer didn’t fit the premise of Carpentier’s piece, so it wasn’t used. To maintain her premise, Carpentier also sloughed off Arianna Huffington in a sentence — sure, the blogger who’s building a freaking empire, who appears on television the most and whose site was recently written up in the New Yorker is a woman, but…

It’s telling that this writer didn’t bother to quote the founder of one of the most trafficked blog sites ever created. What Markos had to say was counter to the story Carpentier had to tell, so to her it’s useless. Funny, I once thought journalism was supposed to find the story, not make it up and then fit the facts. We have the Bush administration for that. MissLaura goes on:

But who the media chooses to quote is just a little bit relevant to which bloggers are best known. Blog audiences can be earned entirely within the blogosphere, it’s true, through stellar writing that draws links that funnel readers. But appearing on television or being cited in the traditional media can boost your prominence … It’s a truism in the blogosphere that links are currency, but it’s as true that traditional media mentions are currency, albeit of a slightly different sort. Links get you more traffic, but media mentions get you the kind of external validation that leads to still more media mentions.

She quotes at length a Chris Bowers post looking at the disproportional influence his own blog (myDD.com) has, despite several other blogs which have far more traffic (including Jane’s Firedoglake). MissLaura then ironically points out that the media, having perpetrated the promotion and references to these blogs, wonder why the blogosphere is doing to prevent all these women from getting positions of prominence. Right. MissLaura then concludes:

Megan Carpentier wrote a really stupid piece for Glamocracy, and her failure to quote Markos rejecting her premise makes you wonder how many other people she left out because what they said didn’t fit her narrative. But she didn’t pioneer this kind of stupidity. She was rerunning a hackneyed story the traditional media has been telling about blogging for quite some time. There are lots of different stories to write about blogs and gender — never mind “prominent” bloggers, why does it seem that state bloggers are so disproportionately male? How do women and men blogging together at group blogs get treated differently by readers or the traditional media? Is it the case that men started the earlier blogs, and if so, at what rate have women been catching up? Whose blogging is more likely to lead to paid work as an institutional or campaign blogger, as a journalist, as a consultant? Do meat-world credentials play a different role in how male and female bloggers are received? These questions don’t get asked, going unmentioned to leave room for the fortieth retread of “why are the three bloggers the laziest journalist can think of all men?”

Chalk up one more instance of why the MSM will continue to be mocked and criticized by bloggers everywhere.